All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [166]
Kate and I were giddy. This was a huge coup in so many ways: This immense cultural figure would be modeling feminist male behavior for hundreds of millions of Indians, directly discussing medically accurate sex education in public, reducing the stigma and myth around HIV, and raising money/awareness for our programs. It was a hallelujah chorus slam dunk.
As we said our goodbyes, members of the costume department brought us gifts, rows of glass bracelets and dangly earrings worn by the film’s stars, wrapped in shiny paper. Kate and I oohed and ahhed. I asked them lots of questions. They said they worked nineteen hours a day, slept on set, and had no union. I was shocked. The unfairness and inequity and brutal poverty of India were really beginning to wear me down. Despite the victories of the afternoon, I was finding myself increasingly pissed off at this country. And at my next activity, I was about to become a whole lot angrier.
Chapter 19
A HOLY MESS
Neelam and Komal, the orphans who asked me to adopt them.
Seek refuge in the attitude of detachment and you will amass the wealth of spiritual awareness. The one who is motivated only by desire for the fruits of their action, and anxious about the results, is miserable indeed.
—Bhagavad Gita, verse 49
atasha sat in a large chair in the production office, looking very small, frail, gorgeous, and groomed. Her hair was long and lovely in a Veronica Lake–type wave. Her English was fairly good, and she was soft spoken yet clear. The camera was set up to protect her identity, and in postproduction her voice would be modified, too. One of the documentary film’s producers, posing as a sex client, had put feelers out to find a “high-class call girl” I could interview to show how HIV/AIDS is spread to the upper reaches of Indian society by prostituted women who service wealthy clients. That was the story we were looking for; what we found out still gives me nightmares.
When Natasha arrived at the address her “escort service” was given and discovered what we were really after, she told us she was a full-fledged sex slave and her life would be at risk if her owner discovered what she was doing. But she wanted to tell her story, if only to help others in her predicament. And we had to pay her fee—12,000 rupees, about $270 U.S.—so that nothing looked odd and she’d have the right sum of money to give her pimp.
When we settled in, she told me she was about twenty-one or twenty-two years old (many Indians can only approximate their age) and had traveled to Mumbai when she was about eighteen to visit some relatives. Her luggage was lost and there had been a lot of confusion about her arrival. She managed to end up at a girlfriend’s apartment to spend the night while she sorted things out. Her friend was going out for the evening and invited her; she was happy to tag along. The friend took Natasha to a hotel. They went up to a guest room, where a man was waiting. The friend smiled and left the room. To her bewilderment, Natasha realized she had been left there to have sex with the man. Fearing physical violence and feeling trapped with no way out, she did. When the man let her go, she went downstairs. Her friend was waiting. She slapped her face. The friend said, “Welcome to the garbage bin.”
In a disastrous piece of timing, the relatives she had been looking for had tracked her down through her friend just as she was leaving the hotel. They put together why she was at such a nice hotel and immediately disowned her as a whore. She had nowhere to go but back to her friend’s apartment, where her fate, trapped in sex, was sealed. Simultaneously, her relatives were spreading this information back home. She was swiftly, irrevocably ostracized by her family there—even though they took the money she sent them.
Natasha told me she was in a hell she could not escape. Her story is a complex puzzle, a combination of truly being trapped and the commensurately powerful perception of being trapped. That makes it hard to describe; it also makes my dismay deeper. Here are some